On paper, the boy is perfect. He works in Private Equity, is Harvard-educated, is tall and handsome, and we even have eleven common friends on Facebook; friends in Boston, New York, Delhi and Bombay, all the cities that we have both lived in.

I wanted to know how it felt to meet a total stranger with the idea of spending the rest of your life together, how the “click” that people spoke about happened. A hopeful inner voice of mine urged me to meet him.  My main motive in meeting Nakul was to get more insight on the book that I was writing, India in Love: Marriage and sexuality in the 21st century—but I was secretly curious about him being a good match for me and wondered if the arranged marriage process could be for me, especially because I had been fighting more than usual with my boyfriend. He wanted to get engaged but I wasn’t sure if he was the right fit for me. If I did break up with him, I knew I could not bear going through the painful rigmarole of dating for a long while, and an arranged marriage seemed like a relatively painless option at this point.

When I had looked at Nakul’s bio-data, he seemed to have some of things that I felt my relationship was lacking and that were the crux of our differences. Research tells us that we have more compatibility to people with similar life experiences, and Nakul reminded me so much of myself. We had similar education, both having studied in Boston and done our MBA’s, we had similar family backgrounds, and we had spent our formative years in both the U.S. and India. Nakul seemed ideal.

When I revealed to my inner circle of friends that I was meeting someone for arranged marriage, they were not surprised, even though they all knew that I had a boyfriend. Many had been through this situation. They were dating men that they liked, but their parents pressured them to meet men that they preferred. Many would resist, but after a while ended up meeting these men, for no other reason than to placate their parents. I knew of a friend, who had great relationship, but met a man through her parents, and immediately decided to marry him, because she thought he would make a good husband. I have another friend who met hundreds of men to keep her parents happy, though she had a boyfriend who she had decided she would marry and was waiting until her parents came to terms with it. I had advice coming in from all directions because everyone that I knew had at some point gone through the arranged marriage process. My friends regaled me with their matrimonial horror stories—a friend of mine had ruined her nuptial chances because she had gone back to the guy’s hotel room after the second meeting. Another had blown it when she introduced a potential to her wayward friends, yet another because she smoked a cigarette.

In an unusually bold step (for me) Nakul flew down from Bombay to meet me. We had never even spoken on the phone, chat, or email. We had only exchanged SMS’s to confirm the time and venue. This made me even more uncomfortable, first because of his apparent seriousness, and second because this earnestness further reflected his good qualities. What if he actually turned out to be the one? Was I indeed ready for this?

Nakul was everything that he promised to be. He was older than I had expected at 36 (his bio-data had said 34) and he was sweet, kind, well-spoken, attentive, curious, and funny. We had lovely time over coffee, and agreed to meet again the following day.

Though everything had gone well with Nakul during our date, as the time approached to meet him again, I did not want to see him. All my nervous energy of the previous day had coalesced into dullness and other unfamiliar feelings that I could not quite understand. I was still nervous, but not in the fresh, light way of the day before.

Somehow, something with Nakul seemed to be lacking in my mind. I couldn’t put my finger on it, and I started harping on the small things: the elasticity of his socks, the unappealing computer bag that he carried, the unimpressive thickness of his hair signaling premature balding. I felt a sinking feeling when I thought about Nakul. The matchmaker was unnaturally clear-headed and had a vaunted prescient about these things; he did do this for a living after all. He had told me to meet Nakul a minimum of three times. After that, he said, I would know. So I did just that.

The buccaneering Nakul flew down again to have dinner with me. As the waiters closed the restaurant, stacking the chairs and rolling the front gate halfway down, Nakul and I talked about everything under the moon. The conversation was smooth, entertaining, and intelligent, but my heart beat with odd little jerks, my hands were cold, and a distasteful feeling oppressed me. I have no idea what unspoken covenant had been broken, or what unwritten law of nature had been transgressed, but when he dropped me to the car and said good-bye, I knew that I would never see him again. As he walked away, I only felt sharp relief.

The truth was that it was difficult for me to accept this arranged marriage business, though I strongly wished that, like many of my friends, I could, too, internalize my past calamities and lend them the heroic dimensions of arranged marriage.  It seemed to be so easy, so straightforward.  With economics, social acceptability, and background in place, marriage should be easy. I had seen so many of my friends and family, including my parents and sister, both men and women, meet their spouse in an easy arranged marriage with none of the anxiety and heartburn of dating. It seemed perfect in theory, but for me, the biggest hurdle towards an arranged marriage was my own mind.

According to Sudhir Kakar, “Arranged marriages work best, and perhaps can only work, if the sexes are kept apart in youth and if marriages take place early, before young men and women have had an opportunity to compare a range of potential partners.” Clearly this had not been the case for me, I had had plenty of interaction with the opposite sex so I wasn’t mentally prepared to take on arranged marriage. Maybe if Nakul and I had met through friends, or at a bar, or night-club, we could have had a perfectly natural, and healthy relationship that may even have resulted in marriage. Just like if some of my boyfriends and I had met through an arranged context, I would have rejected him after the first meeting, only based on his bio-data, despite him being a lovely partner.

But somehow it seemed unnatural to think of marriage as a strategic transaction, to be a calculative decision, and even more, to make loves with a man that I didn’t really love. I wanted to actually fall in love with a loud bang and have scars and bruises to show for the fall. I wanted to date, to be best friends, to fight, to break up bitterly and to make up even more sweetly, and then one day, when the timing felt right and natural, to be married. Though I had been brought up on a diet of arranged marriage, the later conditioning of my mind towards love and romance was much stronger than I had ever imagined. The meetings with Nakul had made me feel interminably uneasy and awfully awkward. It was like going on a date knowing that your choice would be for life, it was more pressure on the heart than I had ever imagined. Ultimately, an arranged marriage was about marrying a person who has the qualities for you to fall in love with, not someone who you are already in love with. Yet all my dating experiences had told me that love was a nebulous, intangible feeling. You couldn’t put a value on it, and I certainly couldn’t make it happen by matching myself with bio-datas supplied by a marriage broker.

(Adapted from the book – India in Love: Marriage and Sexuality in the 21st century. The book hits the book stores everywhere in the first week of March)